Harold shoved back from the desk. The chair legs scraped against the floorboards, and he was already rounding the corner of it, the coin vanishing into his coat before the sound finished.
"Well, let’s go do this," he said, and was through the door.
Jack fell in on Harold's left without a word, and behind them Torvald came out of the office.
"Lord Harold."
Margaret's voice was still inside the office, and it didn't rise to reach him. It had her brand of flatness that stopped him cold.
"Uh…yes, Margaret?"
"I know you are not about to walk out of this office and build some fancy mana spring without speaking to Beth first and messing up her plans for the town, are you?"
Harold froze and turned around, alarm creasing his face.
Margaret hadn't looked up from the ledger. She was still writing something down in her book before finally looking up at Harold and still somehow managed to look down at him while seated.”
Behind him, Jack snorted in amusement.
Harold rubbed the back of his neck and looked torn.
"Fine." He came back into the room a step. "Where's Beth?"
“I don’t keep track of all your people, Lord Harold,” Margaret replied as she stood, but Harold could see a hint of a smile on her face.
“But you do know where she is.” He accused. She rolled her eyes at him. “She’s in her office with some of her team leads.”Harold turned and rushed away, shouting over his shoulder before she could stop him again. “Thanks, Margaret!”He rushed down the stairs and out the keep as fast as he could. His own guard fell in around him, and Torvald rushed to follow.”
The hill dropped away from the keep gate in a switchback of packed gravel, and Harold took it at a pace that had Torvald's boots skidding to catch up on the second turn. Woodsmoke sat low over the roofs below, and somewhere off to the left a hammer was going against iron in a rhythm that never quite settled into a beat.
The hall at the bottom had been the original additional hall they had built. It had now been converted into additional offices for the administrative staff of all the sections. Beth’s area held six desks, four standing boards covered in site maps, and, at the moment Harold got the door open, 100% of Beth's temper.
"— because if we draw the boundary line for that estate where you've drawn them, Corbin, we lose forty acres of the farmland expansion, and I am not explaining to Lord Harold why we lost farm acreage — "
The door swung shut behind Harold with a bang that cut her off mid-word.
Every head in the room turned. Corbin, a thin man with chalk dust to his elbows, went very still, just thankful to no longer be the center of attention.
Jenkins, crowding in behind Harold's shoulder, lifted a hand and waved at Beth like they'd bumped into each other at market.
"Hiya, Beth!"
Beth's eyes found Harold, and everything about her that had been aimed at Corbin retargeted onto him.
"You."
"Uhhh hi Beth. Bad time?" He forced out a chuckle.
"This is your fault." She said it like a verdict already handed down, already appealed, already denied.
Harold took a step back toward the door and did not entirely manage to make it look casual. "We can — maybe we come back after lunch."
"After lunch," Torvald repeated, from somewhere just behind Harold's shoulder, in the flat and reasonable tone of a man who had not yet learned the room. "Why don't you just ask her to change her plans to account for the spring?"
Beth's whole face exploded.
"WHAT?"
The slate came off the standing board so fast Harold barely registered Beth's arm moving before it was already in the air, and he threw himself sideways as it cracked into the doorframe where his head had been a half-second before. Mana flared cold up his spine on reflex, the room going bright and thin at the edges, and he retreated as quickly as he could. Hell hath no fury like a pregnant woman.
Beth stared at the empty space where Harold had been.
"Where did he — " She turned the glare on Torvald instead. "Who in the seven hells are you?"Torvald stared at where his new lord had been. “Um, hi there, Lady Beth? A pleasure to meet you. I’m Torvald Aske, your new mayor.”
Harold's eyes opened on a ceiling, and for a moment he just lay there and let his body remember it hadn't slept enough.
He pushed the blankets back anyway and rotated out of the bed. The floor was cold under his feet.
He made his way to the brazier for the best part of the morning. Caldwell had gotten some wonderful beans from a lord out west, and he gleefully began grinding them by hand in the little iron mill. He set the grounds in the French press, set it on the brazier, and settled in to wait.
He poured it slowly, enjoying the smell as it poured, and he drank it slower, standing next to the brazier with both hands wrapped around the cup. For a few blissful minutes he could just be Harold before the day started. Bethel kept saying these moments were important, and after almost three months since the Lord's trial, he couldn't help but agree.
The quiet didn't last past the cup, but it never did.
His PT clothes were laid out where he had left them — a little heavier than what he'd worn in the summer, wool blended with something the tailors had only worked out how to spin in the last two months, and the difference could be felt. The Landing's tailors had gotten good. It was the start of December now, and winter was a solved problem. Some households were going to have a lean, cold winter, but nobody was going to freeze. They'd spent the whole summer stacking wood for winter, and firewood was available for all, though the basin's winters were mild enough.
He finished his coffee and walked down the stairs, out through the keep's front hall, and into air cold enough to bite on the first breath. Jack was already at the entrance with the rest of the guard, breath fogging around all of them in a little cloud.
"Morning." Harold nodded around the group and got a scatter of nods back.
"Lord Harold." Jack rolled one shoulder, then the other. "Ready?"
"Let's go."
They took off down the cobblestone path at a pace that would've killed him a year ago. Past the row of new pubs that had gone up along the market square, shutters still closed this early, and past the market stalls themselves, canvas rolled and tied against the wind. Past the smithies — the forges already lit. Past Jessim's imbuer workshop.
Past the foundations for the wall, stone laid in long grey lines and reinforced with compressed stone. And out past the edge of the town proper into the farmland, where the homes started.
Over three hundred of them now. A lot of them built out onto shared plots, two or three houses and a common yard, an old-world habit some of the families had brought with them and never let go of; kids were able to run loose between three kitchens instead of one, grandparents who didn't have to live alone.
He pumped his arms and kept pace with Jack without any real effort. A year in Gravesend had rebuilt him from the ground up, and they were moving close to twenty miles an hour down a farm track in the pre-dawn cold, and it barely registered as work.
They hit the treeline and kept running.
The forest opened and closed around them in the grey half-light, trunks going from black shapes to actual trees as the sky lightened somewhere behind the ridgeline, and they kept the pace climbing toward the foothills where the mountains started earning their name.
The camp sat in a clearing the scouts had claimed first, tents and a longhouse and the practice yard bleeding out from it in three directions. The obstacle course had grown since the last time Harold had properly looked at it — new walls, a rope traverse strung between two trees, a mud pit that had clearly eaten someone recently. The platforms were still built next to it for the archers that would be staged there. Next to it, the outdoor gym: racked stone and iron, a row of pull-up bars cut from whole logs, and Jack angling straight for it without breaking stride.
They stopped there. Harold's breath came easily, the run having barely asked anything of him, and he rolled his neck once before he reached for the first block. High-tier mana was no joke.
"Remember no mana here," Jack said, more to the group than to Harold specifically.
That was the rule, and everyone on the yard held to it without needing to be reminded. The run was a mana discipline. Will mana into your limbs and keep up without burning yourself out. The weights were the opposite. No shortcuts, just the base body doing base work. That made the weight rack the most honest place in the County.
Harold's guard had grown to a full fifty men, every one of them a tier-two knight walking the Guardian path, and Harold himself was close enough to the end of that path. A couple more perks. That was all that stood between him and the prime perk.
Six of the fifty were dwarves. Bram had sent them over a month back. He had insisted he be guarded by guardians until his own could be trained — and they'd folded into the guard so fast it barely registered as an integration at all. Dwarves were good people to have at your back. Blunt, loyal past the point of sense, and unbothered by the idea of dying for someone they respected. There was a reason dwarves were a fan favorite on Earth. They were good people.
They hated the run. Every one of them complained about it, every single morning, in different dialects, but the weights were where they came alive.
"COME ON, THORIK, THAT'S A WARM-UP WEIGHT!" That was Elroy, already three sets in, shouting at a dwarf built like a keg with legs.
"IT IS A WARM-UP WEIGHT, YOU BALD SACK OF ELBOWS!" Thorik didn't even look up from the bar. "I AM WARMING UP!"
"He's been warming up for ten minutes," Jenkins said, delighted, to no one in particular.
"DWARVEN WARM-UPS TAKE AS LONG AS THEY TAKE!" That was a second dwarf, shorter and wider than Thorik, chalking his hands.
Harold chuckled at the exchange and began his own sets, block after block. Across the yard, Garrick had a handful of his scout cadre working through a rotation on the far rack.
Harold caught Garrick's eye and got a nod back. He had been traveling back to the Landing more and more to check on Beth as her pregnancy progressed.
They worked until the sun came up, and then Jack clapped and called the group over toward the obstacle course, and the whole yard's energy shifted. "Line up," Jack said, and didn't need to say it twice.
The run built mana control. The weights built the body underneath the control. The course was where the two of them had to learn to work together, and it was the best part of the morning — the one hour where everyone on the yard got to watch their friends eat dirt and then take their turn doing the same thing."Calder's up first!" someone shouted from the platform line, and a chorus of groans and cheers went up together.
Harold rolled his shoulders once, went at the wall first, hit it at a dead sprint, and used the mana willed into his legs to get over the top without breaking stride. The rope traverse came next, thirty feet strung between two pines, and Harold crossed it hand over hand at a pace that had the dwarves booing.
The arrows started on obstacle four.
They were blunted shafts, but that just meant they left a bigger bruise, and Harold ducked the first one under the swing of a balance beam and felt the second one clip close enough to his ear that the fletching brushed his hair as it went past. He caught the third out of the air without thinking, mana singing down his forearm to meet it, and pocketed it in his belt without slowing.
"SHOWOFF!" That was Garrick, from somewhere off to the side, not even looking up from the scout he was correcting. The scouts weren’t pulling their shots; they were firing as fast as their mana would allow.
Harold caught a second arrow through the net crawl, snatched it out of the air on his back with one hand while the other kept him moving through the mesh, and came out the far side to a round of jeering.
The tunnel crawl he took on his belly through six feet of cold mud, came up on the other side breathing hard, and vaulted the hanging rings two at a time without letting his feet touch the ground between them while he dodged even more arrows. The spear weave — a line of spearheads mounted at three different heights and varying angles, meant to punish anyone moving in a straight line.
The tenth obstacle marked the point where the course became much more difficult.
It sat at the far end of the yard, roped off from the rest, and the two scouts standing at either side of it weren't holding weapons. Harold had watched this pair work before. They were both earth crafters employed by the legion as part of their Battle Crafter program. He hit its threshold, and the ground flipped.
The ground turned on him. A spike of packed earth punched up under his lead foot before he'd finished the step, and he threw his weight sideways to clear it and landed in dirt that had gone soft, sucking at his boot to the ankle. He wrenched free and kept moving. A patch firming up under him just long enough to trust before it dropped without warning, another spike lancing up an arm's length to his left where he would have planted. He started watching the dirt, the faint ripple in it, a half-breath before a spike or trap would reveal itself.
He came out the other side breathing hard. Mana he had forced into his limbs was the only thing allowing him to stay ahead of the assault from the earth crafters.
The ground under Harold's lead foot dropped away by enough to catch him wrong. He tried to correct, but he moved a half-beat late, his balance already committed as he hit the ground with an audible thud and slid a few meters along the ground from his built-up momentum.
One of the earth crafters was smiling from the side. "You made it further than Colonel Hale did last week, my lord." She didn't bother hiding how pleased that made her.
Harold spat mud out of the corner of his mouth and got his other foot under him.
"Nobody tell Hale I said this," he said, "but that actually makes me feel better."
The run back went faster than the run out always did, everyone's legs finding the downhill and running faster, eager to be home and get to the baths.
They came out of the treeline with the sun now properly up, and the Landing spread out below them. The legion was drilling on the flat ground past the wall foundations, formations wheeling in blocks tight enough that Harold could hear the Centurion’s calls carry all the way up the slope. Crafters were already on the wall itself, stone rising higher than it had been yesterday. Out past that, a man was working the fence line of the nearest farm, checking posts, and overhead two of the eagles crossed low enough that their shadows swept the field like weather — wingspan longer than a school bus end to end, and still growing, if the reports out of the new mews going up near the mountain treeline were anything to go by.
The market was awake by the time they hit the cobblestones, people bundled shoulder to chin against the cold, breath fogging over baskets and barrows, and Harold let himself enjoy that. It helped him to see people doing well. Even in the winter chill.
Adeline was waiting at the top of it.
She stood just inside the keep gate in a green dress that fit her snugly, her brown hair loose around her face, and she held a second cup of coffee as if she'd timed the pour for his arrival. She was a saint.
"Welcome back." She held the cup out. "Good morning workout?"
"Wasn't bad." Harold took the coffee and scraped one boot against the step to knock the worst of the mud off it. "Still can't make it past the crafters."
"You say that like it's a surprise."
"I’ll get there; I’m already a lot further than I was a month ago."
"Guess you just need to work harder." She fell in beside him as he started up the last stretch of stairs. "You have the final confirmation for our auction lots due, and the first of the visiting nobility start arriving today, so you'll want to be presentable before noon."
"Presentable." Harold looked down at the mud on his boots and the sweat still drying under his shirt. "I have some work to do."
"You definitely need to get to the baths. I think Josh finished the additional building for the spirit spring yesterday. I think he figured out how to stop the stone from breaking down around the increased mana, and those baths should be available." Adeline didn't slow down. "Also — word came in this morning from Lord Henri."
Harold's whole posture changed, coffee forgotten halfway to his mouth.
"And?"
"His grail quest succeeded." She said it like she'd been saving it. "He's full of praise for the new galleys and their crews — apparently they earned it. He took six of the pirate ships intact."
"Six?" Harold exclaimed as he stopped on the landing. "That's — that's great. I figured it would take him till after December to finish it."
"He's going to barely make it back for the auction. Full report when he gets here."
Harold started walking again, faster now. "Did he say what the reward was?"
Adeline's mouth curved. "He did."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Adeline," Harold warned, laughing.
He looked at her sideways, and she looked back at him without blinking. Neither of them broke eye contact, which was becoming something of a pattern between them lately — one he still hadn't worked out what to do with. She was good company, competent and unbothered and never once asking him for anything he didn't already want to give. The best part of his mornings was seeing her waiting for him with that cup of coffee and a smile.
"Are you going to tell me what it was," he asked, taking a slow sip of the coffee just to make her wait for it, "or am I going to have to guess all day?"
Adeline leaned in as if she were about to relent — then her nose wrinkled, and she pulled back with real horror on her face.
"I will tell you," she said, "purely to get you to the baths faster."
"That's insulting."
"I’d care more if you smelled better." She held her ground anyway. "A common path book for the Sailor prime perk. And a cache of system weapons."
"A sailor path book." Harold's eyebrows went up. "We needed that."
"The report will have the rest. Now go bathe; you smell like sweat and mud."
"Like you don't like it." Harold started toward her, grinning, coffee in one hand. "Walk me up? I need my clothes."
"Absolutely not." Adeline was already backing away, one hand up like a ward. "Ew — no — I will meet you at breakfast, and not a moment before."
She turned and walked off so fast it wasn't quite dignified, and Harold laughed and took another sip of coffee as he made his way to his room. Maybe Gravesend wasn’t so bad?